Trump ramps up involvement in this year’s elections in possible preview of midterms pressure

DENVER (AP) — After months of extraordinary steps to ensure his party maintains control of the U.S. House of Representatives in next year’s midterms, President Donald Trump is turning his sights toward the voting process in next week’s elections.

That pivot is raising alarm among Democrats and others who warn that he may be testing strategies his administration could use to interfere with elections in 2026 and beyond.

Late last week, Trump’s Department of Justice announced it was sending election monitors to observe voting in one county in New Jersey, which features a race for governor that Trump has become deeply invested in, and to five counties in California, where Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing a ballot measure to counter the president’s own effort to rejigger the congressional map to elect more Republicans.

That announcement was followed with a pre-emptive attack by Trump on the legitimacy of California’s elections. The post on his own social media platform echoed the baseless allegations he made about the 2020 presidential election before he and his allies tried to overturn his loss in a campaign that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“Watch how totally dishonest the California Prop Vote is!” Trump wrote last weekend on Truth Social, referring to Proposition 50, the lone issue on the state’s special election ballot. “Millions of Ballots being ‘shipped.’”

The combination has prompted responses from several prominent Democrats, who were already bracing for Trump to use his presidential powers to tilt next year’s midterms to his side.

“It’s a bridge they’re trying to build the scaffolding for, all across this country, in next November’s elections,” Newsom said in a video in which he also predicted the administration will send masked immigration agents to polling stations next week.

During early voting so far, there has been no indication that troops or federal officers have shown up near polling sites or ballot drop boxes in any state. Despite the warnings from some Democrats, millions of voters already have cast ballots through early in-person or mail voting, a process that has produced no significant problems.

Voting expected to be ‘safe and secure’

Trump has long accused the Biden administration of trying to interfere in last year’s presidential election after the Justice Department filed federal charges against him related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 results and his retention of classified documents after leaving office.

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson, using the president’s favorite derogatory nickname for California’s governor, said in a statement on Wednesday: “Newscum ought to stop fearmongering to score political points with the radical left flank of the Democrat party that he is courting ahead of his doomed-to-fail presidential campaign.”

Tuesday’s elections are purely state-based, with no federal offices on the ballot. Trump has no ability to change the outcome in any way, experts said.

“Voters who go to vote in the 2025 election are going to find a very safe and secure process,” said David Becker, a former Department of Justice voting rights attorney who now runs the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “For example, I’m 100% confident that whoever wins the statewide elections in Virginia and New Jersey, regardless of what the president says, will take office.”

Some ballot questions have big implications for 2026

The relatively low-profile off-year elections are headlined by the races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, California’s redistricting question and the mayor’s race in New York City.

Two of the states where voting already is underway are considering measures that have major implications for next year’s midterms.

In Pennsylvania, voters will decide whether three Democratic justices keep their seats on the state’s supreme court. If they’re removed, the court will have a 2-2 ideological split and potentially be unable to resolve disputes over voting and election procedures next year in the critical swing state.

In California, voters will decide whether to temporarily override an independent redistricting process and allow the Democratic-controlled Legislature to redraw the state’s congressional districts. If voters pass the measure, it could create five new seats Democrats could win to counter Trump’s push for Texas and other Republican-led states to redraw their districts and increase the number of winnable Republican House seats.

‘These are not normal times’

That’s one reason the administration’s decision to send monitors drew so much attention. It’s not unusual for the federal government to send monitors to observe voting and ballot counting in certain areas, but it’s typically done in consultation with local jurisdictions. That did not happen this time.

Instead, the Trump administration announced the monitors solely in response to requests from local Republican parties.

Federal monitors are only allowed to observe, are prohibited from talking to voters or even poll workers, and have no way to influence the counting of votes, said Becker, who has served as a monitor and also trained them.

“I don’t think voters are ever going to notice or see any of these people,” he said.

Still, the Democratic attorneys general in California and New Jersey raised alarms, with New Jersey’s Matt Platkin calling it “highly inappropriate” and California’s Rob Bonta saying the move is especially concerning given Trump’s record.

“These are not normal times,” Bonta said in a call with reporters this week. “We have to look at the broader context here about what the Trump administration is saying and what they are doing.”

The action follows a monthslong campaign by Trump to use the powers of his office to boost his party’s political prospects ahead of the midterms, where the incumbent party traditionally loses seats in Congress. The president has pushed states where Republicans control the redistricting process to redraw their boundaries to create more conservative-friendly seats. He also has directed his administration to investigate Democratic politicians, fundraisersand donors.

Is Trump positioning for the midterms?

Newsom and his Illinois counterpart, Gov. JB Pritzker, have warned that Trump’s attempts to send the U.S. military into their states’ most populous cities — Los Angeles and Chicago — are precursors to deploying the military or federal agents to polling places in Democratic-leaning cities next year.

They and other Democrats also have alluded to how some Trump allies in 2020 used manufactured claims of election fraud to propose using the military to seize voting machines.

At the same time, the Justice Department is demanding detailed voter data from the states and Trump issued an executive order trying to reshape how elections are run, which has been largely halted by the courts because the Constitution gives that power to the states, and, in some cases, Congress. It spells out no role for the president in setting election rules.

Until fairly recently, Trump had been relatively quiet about the 2025 elections, mostly taking steps that other presidents have made in election years, such as supporting his party’s nominees in key races.

Hannah Fried, executive director of the voting rights group All Voting is Local, said the Nov. 4 election will provide “an important set of data points” about issues that could crop up in future elections, especially next year.

“That’s the big dog,” Fried said of the midterms. “Everybody in the country’s going to be voting in 2026. This is about control of Congress. As a country, we all have a stake in that.”